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Colo is certainly a cheap way to do things for a steady load, and you get great performance for the money, but who wants to get paged at 4am? I know HN and Sta

Colo is certainly a cheap way to do things for a steady load, and you get great performance for the money, but who wants to get paged at 4am? I know HN and StackOverflow do things this way but I don't even want to manage the OS these days. We used to host our servers on-site and it was a massive pain. At least with colo you don't need to personally worry about power or internet going down, but you still need to replace dead disks.

CaptSpify 10y ago
Curious as to why you think aws means you won't get paged at 4-am? If you have a redundant setup, you won't get paged as everything can just fail-over.
- jsingleton 10y ago
  If you set things up badly then you can certainly get paged when on AWS. If you set things up correctly (multiple AZs / regions and auto scaling etc.) then it's much less likely. There could of course be software issues but hardware is no longer your problem and you can let experts do it for you. Yes, you could do this yourself but that would cost more and reduce the advantage. How many colo racks in how many data centres / countries do want to have to visit? Even with redundant hot spare fail-over you will need to fix the hardware at some point and will be running at risk until you do. A hybrid approach can work, with colo for the base load and cloud for scaling spikes / redundancy.
  - CaptSpify 10y ago
    > hardware is no longer your problem and you can let experts do it for you. I've heard this before, but it's basically not true. You still have hardware problems, you're just paying to pretend they aren't there anymore. If you want to do that, it's OK, but we need to stop pretending that throwing money at a problem makes it go away. > Yes, you could do this yourself but that would cost more and reduce the advantage. Compared to AWS pricing? No thanks. I've yet to personally see a company save money by using AWS (ymmv of course). > Even with redundant hot spare fail-over you will need to fix the hardware at some point and will be running at risk until you do. Sure, but that's generally where you save your money. And if you do it right, it doesn't have to be at 4 am
    - iancarroll 10y ago
      At least with Google, you're paying for their transparent migration feature, which does make isolated hardware failures go away.
      - CaptSpify 10y ago
        Most of these places have systems in place to make hardware issues unimpactful, which is why they make the big bucks. But you still have hard limits and issues that can and do arise because it's still reliant on hardware.

CaptSpify 10y ago

Curious as to why you think aws means you won't get paged at 4-am? If you have a redundant setup, you won't get paged as everything can just fail-over.

jsingleton 10y ago
If you set things up badly then you can certainly get paged when on AWS. If you set things up correctly (multiple AZs / regions and auto scaling etc.) then it's much less likely. There could of course be software issues but hardware is no longer your problem and you can let experts do it for you. Yes, you could do this yourself but that would cost more and reduce the advantage. How many colo racks in how many data centres / countries do want to have to visit? Even with redundant hot spare fail-over you will need to fix the hardware at some point and will be running at risk until you do. A hybrid approach can work, with colo for the base load and cloud for scaling spikes / redundancy.
- CaptSpify 10y ago
  > hardware is no longer your problem and you can let experts do it for you. I've heard this before, but it's basically not true. You still have hardware problems, you're just paying to pretend they aren't there anymore. If you want to do that, it's OK, but we need to stop pretending that throwing money at a problem makes it go away. > Yes, you could do this yourself but that would cost more and reduce the advantage. Compared to AWS pricing? No thanks. I've yet to personally see a company save money by using AWS (ymmv of course). > Even with redundant hot spare fail-over you will need to fix the hardware at some point and will be running at risk until you do. Sure, but that's generally where you save your money. And if you do it right, it doesn't have to be at 4 am
  - iancarroll 10y ago
    At least with Google, you're paying for their transparent migration feature, which does make isolated hardware failures go away.
    - CaptSpify 10y ago
      Most of these places have systems in place to make hardware issues unimpactful, which is why they make the big bucks. But you still have hard limits and issues that can and do arise because it's still reliant on hardware.